Devil's Gate

59

ABOARD THE ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again. He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving, pushing Katarina ahead of him.

Clear of pursuers for a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s storerooms and listened.

Some kind of strange alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was about to dive.

“What’s that?” Katarina asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Seconds later a recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat. Stand clear of midships array.”

“We’re running out of time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes left.”

“And we’re going the wrong way,” Kurt said.

They’d had no choice, each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward instead of aft.

In their favor, the ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now dead.

Working against them was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.

The alarm and recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array, larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the top of the Onyx’s hull.

“Let’s go,” he said, pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once again.

She was struggling to keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.

Kurt found a ladder that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down with his feet on the outside rails.

“Come on,” he said. As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand was soaked right through in red.

He went to look at it.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Keep going.”

Another ladder dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on, off, and back on.

It gave him an idea.

“Wait here,” he said.

Kurt crept forward. Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster Unit.”

Behind him, Katarina leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow motion.

“I’m okay,” she said as he started back toward her. “Just… taking… a little rest.”

She wasn’t going to make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at breakneck speed. And they were running out of time anyway.

The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big locked into place.

“How much time?” he asked.

“A minute,” she said through her exhaustion. “Maybe less.”

She slumped onto her side, the blood-soaked rag over her hand smearing blood across the metal deck.

He couldn’t help her now. He had to do something about the Fulcrum before it was too late. With a fire ax he pulled from a bracket on the wall, he broke open the lock on the door in front of him. The sound of throbbing machinery echoed throughout the room.

He stepped inside. Down below were the powerful electric motors of the bow thrusters. By the way the system was acting, it was struggling to keep the ship in some kind of perfect alignment.

Kurt guessed that redirecting a particle beam would require exact precision. If he could stop the thrusters, or throw them off, that might ruin either the beam’s cohesiveness or its aim.

OFF THE COAST OF SIERRA LEONE, Djemma Garand studied the field of battle from his vantage point in the control room of platform number 4. He had forced the Americans back. Twice he had repelled their assaults. Now he would strike with a vengeance.

“Bring all units back to full power!”

Cochrane was beside him, looking nothing like a man who was about to become infamous for all eternity. He looked like a rodent who would rather have scurried under a bush and hid than a man ready to claim his place in history. But he did as he was told, and he had trained Djemma’s other engineers well enough to operate the machinery if he balked.

“All units at a hundred one percent design load,” Cochrane said. “Magnetic tunnels are energized and reading green. The heavy particle mix is stable.”

He looked over at one more screen, a telemetry display from the Onyx. “The Fulcrum array is locked in position,” he said. “You may fire when ready.”

Djemma savored the moment. The Americans had attacked him with missiles and aircraft, and now his sonar readings detected two of their submarines entering the shallows. They were breaking themselves on his strength, and now, as he promised, they would feel his bite.

Once he gave the order, the system would energize. It would take fifteen seconds for the charge to build up in the tunnels of his massive accelerator, and a quarter of a second later the energy burst would race forth, cross over the Onyx, and be directed down onto Washington, D.C.

For a full minute it would spread across the American capital, panning back and forth and wreaking havoc and destruction.

He looked over at Cochrane. “Initiate and fire,” he said calmly.

IN THE THRUSTER ROOM of the Onyx, Kurt found what he needed: the thick high-voltage lines he’d seen in the reactor room. The blue lines, he thought, remembering the schematic. They were routed through the accelerator and then back to the Fulcrum.

That was his only shot. He stepped toward them, swinging the ax and releasing it at the last instant to avoid being electrocuted when it cut into the cables.

The blade hit, and released a massive shower of sparks. A blinding flash of electricity snapped across the gap like man-made lightning, and the entire ship was plunged into darkness.

Kurt was thrown to the deck by the blast. His face felt burnt. For several seconds the compartment was in absolute darkness. The motors of the bow thrusters rattled loudly and began winding down. Finally, the emergency lights came on, but, to Kurt’s great joy, nothing else seemed to have power.

He hoped it was enough. He hoped it had been done in time.

UP ON THE SHIP’S BRIDGE, Andras stared. The ship had gone black, and in the dark of the night it seemed as if the world had vanished. Seconds later the emergency lights had come on.

At first he feared the array had somehow overloaded the system. He reached forward, tapping at the Fulcrum’s controls and flicking the toggle switch on the side of the unit. He got no response, not even a standby light.

A second later some of the basic systems came back online, and Andras looked around hopefully.

“It’s just the one-twenty line,” one of the engineers said. “The high voltage is still down.” The man was flicking a few switches of his own to no effect. “I have no thrusters, no power to the array. No power to the accelerator.”

Andras leaned forward to check the Fulcrum array visually. It stood there, spread out like the canopy of a giant tree that had somehow sprouted from the center of the ship, but it was dead. Not even the blinking red warning lights were illuminated anymore.

He grabbed the joystick that had raised it into position and fiddled with it for a second, then flung the controller aside with great bitterness.

“Damn you, Austin!” he shouted.

After a moment to reflect he realized that power could be restored. He just needed to make sure Austin wasn’t around to cut it a second time. He grabbed his rifle and checked the safety.

“Get somebody down there to reroute the high-voltage lines,” he ordered. “We’ll try again, once it’s up and running.”

The engineer nodded.

Another man looked over at Andras from the far corner of the bridge. “What do we tell Garand if he calls?”

“Tell him… he missed.”

With that, Andras stormed out of the bridge, a single thought burning his mind: Austin must be destroyed.